1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a tablet conveying apparatus capable of adjusting the tablet position and a tablet cutting apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
In past, in hospital and pharmacy tablets are provided to patients according to prescriptions. When one tablet is overdosage or it is hard for a patient to swallow one tablet, this tablet then has to be cut in half or more for example. For such circumstance, cutting a tablet directly by hand is the simplest and fast way. Therefore, a cutting groove is formed on the tablet. In addition, a cutter for cutting tablets is also disclosed by Japanese gazette of JP 6-41546.
Due to that cutting tablets by hand is not very efficient and economic in practice, an automatic tablet cutting machine is disclosed by Japanese gazette of JP 3-114241 and JP 2-29257.
However, the cutting machine uses a belt to retain the tablet and convey to a rotary blade (or a cutter capable of moving up and down), and then a circular tablet as shown in FIG. 10C is cut. The automatic tablet cutting machine is designed only for the circular tablet rather than for oval or rectangular tablets. For example, a tablet shown in FIGS. 10B and 10C cannot be cut by the automatic tablet cutting machine.
Namely, the tablet cannot be stably retained by the belt if the tablet is oval or rectangular and the long side of the tablet can not be kept in one direction. Therefore, the relative position between the tablet and the cutter is not well defined when the tablet is conveyed to the cutter. And it is hard to equally cut the tablet in half.
The present invention can adjust the position of the tablet as shown in FIG. 10C and a tablet conveying and cutting apparatus capable of adjusting the position of the tablet is provided.
Furthermore, a machine capable of adjusting the position of the tablet and conveying the tablet for examining the tablet is also disclosed (such as JP 7-201644). However, the machine uses an industrial conveying belt for transporting the belt and it is only suitable for large equipments of a factory. Therefore, the proposed machine is not suitable for an automatic cutting machine for a pharmacy.